Fidelity and fecundity

Editor’s note: Each Thursday, we feature a throwback piece from Topology’s predecessor, catapult magazine. In this essay from 2009, Gary Guthrie explores the fruit of faithfulness. The text of this article is a talk originally presented at the Faith, Food and Agriculture Conference on March 7, 2009, in Washington, Iowa.

Love and fidelity have come together;
justice and peace join hands.
Fidelity springs up from the earth
and justice looks down from heaven.
The Lord will add prosperity,
and our land shall yield its harvest.
Justice shall go in front of him
and the path before his feet shall be peace.Psalm 85: 10-13

Fidelity: a sense of faithfulness and fierce loyalty, a willingness to persevere in the face of obstacles often over a long period of time. Fecundity: fruitfulness, abundance, a sense of incredible fertility. The Psalm passage illustrates well the connection between the two. There are the elements of fidelity and love, but also justice. What is the fruit of the fidelity? It is the prosperity of the land yielding its harvest. To me, this passage from Psalm 85 is the hope, the promise of sustainable agriculture. It is this vision of hope I would like to share with you based on my own experiences since starting my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in 1997.

The French painter Paul Cezanne stated, “The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” It took me awhile to freshly observe my carrots and to come to know what a stir they would create. When I started Growing Harmony Farm in 1997, CSA’s were just getting started in Iowa. I believe 1996 was the first year, if I am not mistaken. I had a vague notion that after helping farmers in Bolivia and El Salvador and then working for the Iowa Peace Network for six years, I wanted to get my hands back in the soil. When I heard about CSA’s I thought this might be the opportunity. None of us had any experience with CSA’s. I didn’t take the time to travel to Massachusetts or other places in the U.S. where there were CSA’s that had been established for a few years. I had almost no experience growing vegetables except for a small square foot garden in Des Moines and I grew up with my parents’ postage stamp garden of a rotation of potatoes and tomatoes. I didn’t create a business plan and map out my garden in detail. For many reasons, I should have been a complete failure!

In 1997, I started with four families that expanded to six by the end of the season, which was only a half season since we didn’t move to the farm until Fourth of July weekend. In 1998, with 18 families, I almost made minimum wage! Also in 1998, my parents gave up growing their tomatoes because they thought, “Well, Gary will have all these tomatoes so we don’t need to bother!” 1998 was a terrible tomato year and I felt an incredible tension: “Should I give my parents tomatoes or my members?” I chose wrong! I gave too many to my members, albeit meager, and not enough to my parents. I learned rule number one: Always give first fruits abundantly to my parents, especially when I am not paying rent!

My parents began questioning whether this CSA endeavor was worth the effort and I began questioning it, as well. I had to ask myself, “Why am I doing this?” I could get depressed when I thought about all the work, especially the relentless weeding, for little financial gain. I also felt in those first years that I was doing this all on my own. There were not a lot of mentors out there to call and ask for help. When I thought about the finances, I would get down, but when I focused on the relationships and the people I was serving, that is what sustained me. I tried to stay faithful to the relationships and to the long range vision of community. I did not really know what that meant at the time, but it was a gut feeling that what I was doing was right. Because of my work with agriculture in Bolivia and El Salvador, I knew the interconnections between justice, land, and food and I knew that CSA’s were an opportunity to integrate them into one. That is part of the vision that I was trying to be faithful to.

So when did I start to freshly observe my carrots? I didn’t start taking note until Kathleen Delate, the Iowa State University organic specialist, started telling people at conferences that my carrots were the best tasting carrots she had ever eaten! I hadn’t thought much of it until then. In 1998, I planted some carrots really late between my asparagus plants. It was something of an experiment, but they didn’t grow much so I just let them be. Then, on Thanksgiving Day, I was out by the garden taking a walk and I thought to myself, “Gosh, I wonder if these carrots are any good?” I dug up a few, washed them off in the porch and took a bite. They had grown to the size of my thumb, but they knocked my socks off with their sweetness and crispness! “Maybe I have something here!” I thought. The cool nights and warm days of October and early November turned all the starches in those Bolero carrots to sugar.

Just because one is faithful to a relationship or endeavor does not mean there will automatically be abundance. But what I think it does do if we are open to the Spirit is to create the possibility of fertility. Faithfulness to relationship creates an environment of possibility for the seed to sprout and produce abundantly. There is an element of grace in these endeavors and I can look back now and see how grace was working. I don’t recommend that beginning farmers start growing large quantities of carrots! Carrots start out with a very fragile seed and need just the right conditions to emerge from the ground. Once emerged, their stand can diminish with hard rainfalls. Grace was with me when I started with loamy soils. Grace was with me when I started with good quality varieties, Nelson and Bolero.

I started small and as I developed my system I was slowly able to expand my production so that in 2001, when a restaurant came to me asking for produce, I thought I could expand production. That’s how I ended up with nearly a half acre of carrots each year. When I first began, I was harvesting around 100 pounds of produce from each 100-foot bed. Two summers ago, I dug up an old bed of raspberries that were not producing very well. As it happened, that was where I was going to be planting carrots in my rotation. It was fascinating to observe the difference in quality and production between the raspberry carrots, whose growth was stunted and the skin quality was undulated and not translucent, in part due to less tilth, more clay, and less organic matter in the soil. One bed just a few feet from those carrots produced a record amount—more than 400 pounds from one bed! Imagine going from 100 pounds to 400! Now that is fertile! But I had to be faithful to a good crop rotation with cover crops, mulches, and composted manure. I had to feed the soil life community and create a system that was truly sustainable in order to sustain such yields! Fertility just doesn’t happen—it has to be nurtured with love.

This past year with the extra rain my flaming for weed control in my carrot beds did not work as well as usual. Often when I have members come out or extra help, I might ask them to weed a carrot bed or two. One day, I asked two folks to start on several carrot beds thinking that they should be able to weed a least two beds in a couple of hours. I kept thinking to myself, “Why are they taking so long?” But I didn’t mention anything, as they were out on their own good will, even if I was paying them. The next day my summer worker was gone so I thought I had better finish weeding the carrots before they get beyond help. It took me 12 hours to weed four 100-foot-long beds and I am a fast weeder!

There are many people who think I am insane and there are very few who would consider spending that amount of time weeding over two days, a Friday and a Saturday. But I didn’t want to ask anyone else to weed and I didn’t think I could afford it! Yet thoughts of fidelity kept coming back in my mind: “That is where love and fidelity meet.” It is in the land and in the food and a willingness to persevere to allow the fruit of our labor to mature.

Ignatius of Loyola in his principles of discernment talks about the Magis, the More. As we make decisions in our lives he would have us look, using all of our senses, at our feelings, our minds, our hearts—what is going to give us more life? When do I feel most alive? In a sense, this is what Jesus means when he shares in John 10:10, “I have come that all may have life, and may have it in all its fullness.”

We come here this morning with our own stories of faithfulness and passion for sustainable food systems. Perhaps we were awakened when someone close to us died from cancer or another friend survived cancer or another illness. Perhaps we saw the pesticides and herbicides being sprayed all around our fields and felt an uneasiness that something isn’t right. Perhaps, after having eaten so many store-bought strawberries, we eat our first locally grown one—maybe one that we grew ourselves in our back yard—and we say, “Wow, what taste!” Perhaps we start out with a disquiet and we know what is not giving us life and as we begin to explore we begin to make small baby decisions, and with each one there is a small “yes,” but they lead to bigger “Yesses.” Each decision leads to more life. What began with fear and isolation is a journey toward hope, connection and community.

When a six-year-old boy asks his mother, “Mom can I have another carrot?,” that is the principle of Magis at work. Literally! That is the More.

When a daughter grabs the cucumber out of the box of vegetables and starts chomping away before they can get in the car and the mother smiles with joy knowing it is safe and satisfying: that is More!

When a mother has to tell her three children, “No more eating the peas!,” that is More.

When a family comes out to the farm to dig sweet potatoes because the parents had grown up on a farm and they want their children to have a connection to the land, it provides a space and connections across generations as now the grandchildren have something to share with their grandparents. They now have a sense of the sweat and toil and grace that goes into bringing their food to the table. That is More!

When three children sit down to a piece of homemade strawberry-rhubarb pie and much to the chagrin of their parents and absolute delight to the cook, they lick their plates: that is Life! That is the More! It is not just the taste of the pie. It is also the fruit of the fellowship and laughing around the table as they lick their plates with gusto!

One day, I received a phone call from my son, Eric, asking if I could bring some carrots into town. A friend, after having tasted my carrots during a horticulture presentation that I had given in the high school, wanted to share some with his friends at a tail-gate party before a soccer game. That same afternoon, as I was rounding a corner at the school with my son on the way to the game, a student asked me, “Do you have any carrots on you?” I exclaimed to Eric, “Wow, that’s incredible, two carrot requests in the same day from high school students!” Eric replied, “Yeah, in the hallways, the word is out. They call them kick-ass carrots!” Now that is Life! That is the More!

One member shared,

The deepest joy is in working alongside old friends and making new friends as we pull, cart, trim, bundle, and hang the crop. Six work in the barn, sharing tales, while two of us pull and cart while sharing more personal stories of struggles with our families and churches, painful struggles that have helped us, or are helping us, grow in our relationships. Two days of work among these good friends and friends-to-be have been the richest fellowship I have enjoyed in the past year. Liz simply says: “Working like this makes me feel almost Amish.”

Now that is More with Less!

In an article titled, “The Anticancer Lifestyle” in the most recent AARP magazine, a doctor who had contracted brain tumor a number of years ago wrote:

What I’ve learned in my own journey is that the best way to go on living is to nourish life at all levels of my being: through my meals, through my walks in nature, through the purpose in my work, through the flow of love in my relationships, and through the protection of our environment. Science told me that this slows down cancer, and, perhaps even more important, it brings to my life, every day, a new light and a new meaning.

Dr. Servan-Schreiber understands the More!

One seldom observes the fruit of fidelity in a short period of time. My wife, Nancy, and I have had our ups and downs in our marriage of nearly 23 years. And while there have been many blessings and a heck of a lot of grace, it has only been recently that I am beginning to understand and appreciate the incredible fruit and blessings that have come from our being faithful to one another throughout these many years.

As within a marriage, I had a vague sense of what I thought community would look like in those first few years of CSA farming. Yet I felt the burden and I wasn’t trusting. I soon found out that those members who essentially saw my relationship with them as an economic exchange of dollars for vegetables did not stay with me long. Over the years I began observing that many members who invited other people to participate in the farm did so because they were neighbors and or they went to the same church, and so over time there have been multiple layers of connections with the Growing Harmony Farm community. While I don’t advertise the farm as a Christian endeavor, members know that my faith is important to me and that there is a Spirit of inclusion and hospitality at my community gatherings.

God invites us to love and belong in creation, and from our fidelity to places, relationships and good work within both will come the blessing of fecundity—whether it be children, a productive farm, a creative pursuit, a strong community, a healthy civic life or expansion of the “inner frontier” of personal growth and wisdom. God did not intend that we define ourselves as mere consumers of goods (hence, producers of waste and pollution), but rather as faithful lovers, whose love adds something precious and beautiful to the world.

Cynics would have us believe that food is scarce and we need Genetically Modified Organisms and all the technology that goes with them to help feed the world’s people. They try to instill fear in people. Why? So the food corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, Tyson, and the ADM’s of the world can continue to control our food system. So perhaps a single carrot, freshly observed, can start a revolution because it begins with love, not fear!

When we pledge fidelity to the God of Life, to the principle of Magis, through the ups and downs of our lives, our seasons (how many times have many of you wanted to give up especially during the floods and rains of last season?) and pledge fidelity to a piece of land, to a certain farmer or community, family—we discover that there is abundant life available for all. The soil begins to yield many fold harvests and relationships bear fruit, giving us an overall sense of well-being. We learn that in a cooperative food system everyone wins; there are no losers because it is based on right relationships.

Amazingly, the morning I wrote this talk, I decided to look at the current reflection by Ronald Rolheiser, a Catholic spirituality writer. The theme? “Fidelity—Our greatest gift to others.” He writes,

In the end, faith is not simply the good, secure feeling that God exists. Faith is a commitment to a way of living beyond good and secure feelings. To have faith means to sometimes live our lives independent of whatever feelings may come. Ultimately faith is not in the head or the heart but in the action of a sustained commitment. Faith is fidelity, nothing more but nothing less.

And, perhaps more than anything else, that gift is what is needed today in our families, in our churches, and in our world in general. The greatest gift we can give to those around us is the promise of fidelity, the simple promise to stay around, to not to leave when things get difficult, to not walk away because we feel disappointed or hurt, to stay even when we don’t feel wanted or valued, to stay even when our personalities and visions clash, to stay through thick and thin.

Do not give up. Keep your vision for a more sustainable world where we live in harmony with our environment and communities. It is and will not be easy but if we remain faithful, this is our promise:

Love and fidelity have come together;
justice and peace join hands.
Fidelity springs up from the earth
and justice looks down from heaven.
The Lord will add prosperity,
and our land shall yield its harvest.
Justice shall go in front of him
and the path before his feet shall be peace.Psalm 85: 10-13

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Gary Guthrie lives on his parents’ farm near Nevada, Iowa. Though he still gardens a 1/2 acre garden and sells produce from it, he is more involved in eldercare now as his parents age. Gary became a beekeeper last year and the bees are showing him new paths towards Fidelity and Fecundity! He participates with Farm2Folk Cooperative CSA in Ames, IA.

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